Home Brew Forum

Everything weighed out - notice the substitite for the obligatory home brew bottle one would normally sup at this stage? ...... Papazian had a point when he said Relax Don't Worry ... Have a Home Brew. Had to resort to favorite local tipple (in case of emergencies open bottle!)


Everything Clean


Let's Mash

At this point, I decided to use up some (very) old stock. the recipe ended up being:-
9260g Crushed Pale Malt (260g about three years old)
200g Crystal Malt (3 y o )
200g Flaked Maize (3 y o)
(saving about 500g of pale and 500g of crystal towards my next brew ... hopefully not 3 years this time!)


Photo looks Blue (akili?) but when it dried it was around 5.2 ... this was a cooled down wort sample taken after 20 mins into the mash. When does one usually take the reading?


Sparged (now I wish I had measured the gravity to know when to finish the sparge ....... )



65g of goldings added (blended between old stock and some new - added about 5g to my recipe to make up for 'tired' stock.
Added 100g of blended fuggles and boiled for an hour.
The late hops were 15 mins of 'new' goldings (30g) ... irish moss 1.5 teaspoons. Boiled, cooled then BANG! problem with at least 2 gallons left in bottom of the boiler, a problem I never had before. I needed to touch the pre-cooled wort to adjust the hop back device. (bleached hands) but am now anxious to know if I infected the brew & why it got clogged the way it did
Anyway got one more gallon out of it and cut my losses with 9 gals out of the anticipated 10.

Pitched the bag of Hogs Back Brewery supplied yeast at 11pm

Looks & smells fermenting ok this morning

Fingers crossed ....

Nice one Phil

Hope it turns out well!

I use the same procedure to check pH, though I always take the reading wet - the colour changes if you let it dry, and I assume that the manufacturers calibrate it to read correctly when wet.

I use exactly the same procedure as well

Edit :- Brew looks good too

Looking good madbrewer, I always take my ph reading when wet as Jim does.

Well done madbrewer, welcome back

Look forward to hearing how this comes out - maybe grain stores better long term than we thought!

So it's 'blue' then. This means more Alkali range of the PH scale and in need of more CRS ..... maybe a total of 3 teaspoons over 46 litres? Not sure how hung i need to get over it, but if it's wrong and I know about it .... in future i need to do something, what do I do?

Progress report .... Have just transferred this brew into a secondary/wine fermenter probably for another 6 or 7 days. I didn't take a gravity reading as I was planning to use the beer at the bottom of the fermenter for this, however my syphoning was a little more economic this time and what was left looked too sludgy to give an accurate reading. However I did have a teste and despite the yeasty after taste it tasted good .... somewhat of a relief.